STATEMENT

Memory is a liar, but it is also malleable, inquisitive, impressionable, connecting, and seemingly real. Through a collection of autobiographical memories, my work exposes the facade of memory as it was experienced during childhood, remembered as an adult, and co-constructed by external perspectives through discussion. I respond to the echoes of a dysfunctional familial history, challenge the creation of identity, and highlight the incorrectness and messiness of memory. Inherently, forcing myself to acknowledge my own distortions of the past, while remaining open to unrealized truths–collaging together memories from a childlike perspective, with an adulterated view. 

Consumed with recurring characters and personified objects, the work collaborates with the mythologies of children’s literature, acting as a source of metaphor, familiarity, and uncovers a disturbance in the ordinary by employing the uncanny– at times being humorous and at others being horrific. Through illustrative drawings and traces of repetition that run parallel to the act of routinely processing the past, the drawings juxtapose both the failure of memory and its endurance; where the more that I remember, the more distorted the story, and memory, becomes. The unknowability of fractured or disrupted moments enforce non-linear characteristics and double meanings of symbols and stories, and challenge the reliability of personal truth. The work is not a method of fixing truth; rather, a constant revision of perception and understanding to whom and where we belong.